Would the shtetl be gone anyhow?

[mccoyxyz]

Having read some of IB Singer's fiction set in the shtetl, I'm struck at how remarkably parallel the nostalgia is, when you compare it with how my grandparents' generation (now all dead), used to speak.
They endlessly talked of a vanished way of life, things like all those fishing outports in Newfoundland abandoned, or the mechanization and depopulation of farm areas after WW2, in some cases one farm family occupying a space that twenty used to.
So, think about an alternate history, just imagine WW2 happened, the same in every detail except that there was no Holocaust.
So, instead of all those Jews killed, you now have a huge number of them killed off by WW2 combat, in the armed forces of whatever country they lived in. After the war, you'd still have the rural to urban population shift.
So, how many of those shtetl's would be ghost towns, even had there been no Holocaust?

[Laurasia]

Hi McCoy.

Well considering our German aim to re-populate those areas that we claimed, I would suspect that they would not be left as "ghost towns"...at least not permanently.

Sincerely,
Laurasia

[mccoyxyz]

I realize of course your reply was meant to be humorous, but even then:
1) do you recall the saying "how are you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?" which comes out of WW1?
2) in a lot of areas of rural Canada, electricity did not get out of the towns and onto actual farms until the 1950's.
Even resettled Germans would feel some of these influences and the influence of the postwar job boom in the cities, which bypassed rural areas.
So, I propose to you a guess that probably 9/10 of those shtetls would become actual ghost towns and probably 1/10 would be somewhat expanded market towns.